I feel like most casual users would not make the connection of “crawlers” to link previews that they talk about it the article.

Sure, if you understand that robots.txt includes all robots then sure. But that is not how general news media has been talking about robots.txt.

Is this just meant to make git clone always clone recursively?

Can’t you do this with aliases in your .gitconfig?

I have something similar.

alias "..1=cd .."
alias "..2=cd ../.."
... etc

I did have code that would generate these automatically but Idk where it is.